Four Weddings and a Funeral
by madame.alexandra
Summary: This story is about Gibbs, so I feel the title is relatively self-explanatory. Five very short stories concerned with the women he married over the years, and the one he never did. It's fairly Shannon/Gibbs heavy, but there's a pretty wicked Jibbs undertone.
1. 1982

_a/n: "The only woman you ever loved was Shannon." _

* * *

_1982: One; Shannon_

* * *

The day he married Shannon Fielding, the old cliché rang true: it was, and remained, the happiest day of his life.

It was a traditional affair with little pomp and circumstance; they were too freshly started in life to afford anything more than the simplest of three-tiered cakes and the most modest of perfectly arranged flowers—sunflowers and violets, because they were her favorites.

They had poured their meager savings into a place to live and a honeymoon and thus sacrificed any gaudiness in their ceremony. Her mother bought her dress and she wore it with grace, her hair down, curled, and clipped back from her face with a pearl-encrusted comb that had belonged to his grandmother.

She looked beautiful, he remembered.

He hadn't thought for a second the day was stressful or boring; he had looked forward to it eagerly. He had hung on her words as she said the vows, and gruffly stumbled through his, his eyes unwavering on hers the entire time he spoke. He was promising his life to her, the entirety of his being, and he didn't want that moment ruined by a blink.

His hand shook when he slipped the wedding band onto her finger and she laced her fingers into his, gripping tightly. There was no anxiety in her when she returned the favor, but she bit her lip and her cheeks flushed happily.

She tilted her head up and smiled, her tongue held lightly between her teeth in that way he loved so much, and still saw in his dreams.

He had thought, in the months leading up to it, that he would make a fool of himself at the church—he wasn't really cut out for formal functions or uptight engagements—but it was Shannon who messed it up, and did it so innocently, he wouldn't have wanted any other way.

She reached up to touch his neck, her fingers slipping into the collar of his military dress blues, and he held her wrists, listening to the priest cement their vows, and she tilted her head, pursing her lips. She turned to the Father; her brow furrowed, and didn't seem to notice he wasn't done.

"Can I kiss him now?" she asked.

Startled, the man's eyes widened at her, and Gibbs had laughed when he heard her mother give a scandalized gasp from the front row. But the priest smiled, and dipped his head in approval.

She smiled radiantly, and pulled his mouth down to hers, and when the minister announced them as Mr. and Mrs. Leroy Jethro Gibbs, the words rang in his ears forever, long after the taste of her kiss faded and the feel of her in bed next to him became harder and harder to recall.

It was the only memory he had of her that was untainted, and brought him peace when he thought of it.


	2. 1992

_a/n: there is no confirmed canon as to the name of Gibbs' first wife post-Shannon; my headcanon mostly calls her 'Stacy'. _

* * *

_1992: Two; Stacy_

* * *

His second wedding was muted; almost uncomfortable.

There weren't many people in attendance, a vast majority of them were not a part of the crowd who had been at his first, and he sensed the confusion in the few who were there—the tumult, the uncertainty of his marrying again so mind-numbingly quickly after her death.

It was numbing, that was the point; that was what he sought. He wanted to stop suffering, he wanted to escape the crushing pain that came with an empty bed and a hollow life; he wanted to block it out. He was told to grieve; but he wanted to forget.

Stacy was smart and kind-hearted; she had red hair that was the colour of Shannon's, dark chestnut eyes—but she was Shannon's height, and she had a unique, amusing laugh that was loud and startling and used to catch him off guard so much his sorrow would be wiped from his mind for at least a moment.

He had no clear memory of the day, he only had vague details filed away—there had been pink roses, and her bridesmaids, women he barely knew, wore short dresses in tropical print, because they'd gotten married on the beach in California, and Franks had stood up with him, arching one skeptical, scraggly eyebrow and smoking a damn cigarette.

"I hope you know what you're doin', Probie," Franks growled under his breath, grinding the butt of a Lucky Strike under his boot at the reception.

He cleared his throat, and kissed Stacy's cheek when she appeared and rested her petite hand on Gibbs' arm. Her brunette eyes glittered, and he wished violently that they were blue, and that she was a different woman.

He didn't answer Mike Franks, and his divorce two years later was brutal, but at least for a while his nightmares weren't filled with Shannon's tears and Kelly's screams, instead they were replaced with Stacy's ice-cold face and the chilling way she negotiated their split, acting as her own lawyer.

She cited; _irreconcilable differences. _

But she stood in the kitchen, in the spot where Shannon had once told him she was pregnant, and she shed tears, and she shoved him away from her, and she berated him, heartbreak in her eyes.

"_You've called me Shannon more times than I can count. I'm Stacy! I'm Stacy! She's dead, Jethro!" _

He wanted to hit her, but he refrained; he said nothing, he accepted her terms, and he tried to remember why he'd married her, but he felt nothing, like he'd felt nothing at their wedding when he'd promised forever to Stacy as he was thinking of Shannon.


	3. 1995

_a/n: "You were my Shannon, Leroy." _

* * *

_1995: Three; Diane_

* * *

His third wedding was the stuff of fairytales—to her. He went along with what he was told to go along with, and the planning was as chaotic and wild and slightly breathtaking as the courtship had been.

He wasn't even looking, when he found Diane.

She was the most infuriating woman he'd ever come into contact with but she was also the kind of strikingly beautiful that stopped a man dead in his tracks. She was passionate and untamed, young and demanding, and she bewitched him in a way he begged to be ensnared.

His wedding to her was the first time he felt the typical annoyance at being dragged to cake-tastings and dancing lessons, because for his first wedding he'd have done anything happily, and for his second he'd felt nothing, and Stacy hadn't cared if he was involved.

Diane made a stunning bride, and she made sure the wedding was one for the papers—from the engraved invitations to the expensive caterers and impossible-to-book venue. He rolled his eyes and went along with it, because for a little while, seeing her smile her crooked, wicked smile was the only thing keeping him going.

He had lost his mentor at work to political maneuvering, and he was back in D.C., back in the house he couldn't stand, and he needed to fill it with something that wouldn't haunt him or rip him to shreds, and so he put a diamond on Diane's finger and promised her vows that by then, he knew almost by heart, but that he hadn't really meant since nineteen-eighty-two.

Wedding vows weren't supposed to be so mechanical, so stiffly memorized from previous affairs.

There was no one from his old life at his third wedding. There were stunning bouquets of lilies and lace tablecloths, but there was nothing and no one to remind him of what he lost, and what he still clung to even while he tried to stamp it to the back of his mind and avoid facing it.

The only thing that dampened the day was the look in Diane's sharp, beautiful eyes when he said _I do_ and she sensed he was thinking of another woman, and the desperation in her kiss when they sealed the vows and he could feel her trying to hold him.

She stayed so long, she gave him so much, and he bled her heart dry, until the only thing she had left was anger, and the acid bitterness that leaked from a broken heart, and on the same day she swung a golf club at his head, she threw her diamond from her finger and broke it under her feet, swearing she'd take him for everything he was worth.

He had married once for unconditional love, once to seek a replacement, and this time because Diane was everything Shannon had never been, and that came back to bite him, too, because he had liked her on the day he'd married her, but by the time she did leave him with nothing, he hated her for reminding him that there was no woman like Shannon; Shannon was gone forever, and he had nothing but another box of wedding pictures in the attic, another failed marriage under his belt, and the knowledge that he had broken a woman's heart badly enough to make her truly hate him.


	4. 2000

_a/n: "We'll always have Moscow." _

* * *

_2000: Four; Stephanie_

* * *

His fourth wedding was a whirlwind, a shock—they eloped. He had hardly had time to call her a serious girlfriend before he was marrying her in a chapel in St. Petersburg, a week before he reported to his new post in Moscow.

Stephanie was a soft-eyed, religious kind of pretty, a woman whose heart beat on her sleeve, who liked men in uniform and the classic chivalrous knight stories—and somewhere between his Sig Saur and his federal badge, she saw what she wanted to see, and he let her piece together a false idea of what kind of man he was because he needed her to ease his depression and his heartache.

He was still mired in the shards of a Parisian affair, and the destruction of that relationship had thrown him back into the dark waters of the never-ending grief losing Shannon had left him with.

Of the two witnesses at his fourth wedding, one spoke English—his new control officer, an Agent Callen.

Stephanie had a fistful of cherry blossoms and a dress of pale blue that stayed in his head for days, even after she'd taken it off and they'd spent a weekend buried in a luxury hotel in the city, wearing nothing.

There was a clandestine thrill to that wedding that distracted him for months on end, each time he told someone he was married again and he saw the looks in their eyes, and he relished it.

Time was suspended in Russia, heartache was frozen for a moment, and he fooled himself into thinking this marriage was right; Stephanie was going to make him happy, Stephanie was a unique kind of distraction—she was like Shannon, but she was vastly different, and most importantly, she was nothing like the woman who had wrecked him in Paris; in eloping with Stephanie, he found a medium between trying to forget two women.

He was sent back to D.C., and there it fell apart, she found his secrets in pictures in his wallets and he thought she'd never stop crying, and he couldn't stomach the tears so he started to lash out at her, anything to shut her up. He was sent on a rotation in the Mediterranean, Agent Afloat, and when he came back, Stephanie was in bed with another man.

It was the first time he filed for divorce, and he was glad, he was vindictive, he put his energy and the raw mess that had been his emotions since nineteen-ninety-one into blaming her and absolving himself when he knew it was his fault she had been so miserable.

He and Stephanie lasted a mere fourteen months, and yet even after that short time, he no longer remembered the secret thrill their quick, Siberian wedding had given him.


	5. 2008

_a/n: "Ah, you're an ex-wife?" "No." _

* * *

_2008: One; Jenny_

* * *

He was not the last man standing at the memorial service; Ziva stood in the distance, far from him and embroiled in her own grief. She made no move to speak to him, to comfort him, and he appreciated her all the more for it.

Here he stood, in another tuxedo, at another funeral, for another woman he had not been able to save. And this time, too, he hadn't been able to say goodbye; he hadn't been able to look upon her face one more time before she was gone forever—and this time, due to his own cowardice rather than impossibility.

It was hot, and he was sweating, but he could not move away from the headstone, marking an empty grave, with her name scrawled across it in calligraphy that would haunt him as relentlessly as the calligraphy on Shannon's.

He felt hollow, empty, and sick; three feelings he was painfully used to, three feelings he almost didn't know how to live without anymore. He quietly asked why, but he had never received an answer from any benign God, and so his grief flared to anger for a moment, and then he was exhausted from it all, and knelt, and swept two wilted dandelions from the rough, weedy grass around him.

He let them fall to the ground from his hands, sprinkling the natural, flowery weeds and soft brown dirt onto the fresh grave, mourning the only woman who had known and loved the shell of a man Shannon had left behind, thinking Jenny Shepard was the only woman after Shannon he hadn't married, and was the only one he should have.

And for Jenny, he wore a tux at the grave, instead of at the altar.

* * *

_-alexandra_  
_story #137_

_*yes, the title is an allusion, though this clearly isn't a comedy. _


End file.
